"All living plants
and animals, including man, are the modified descendants of one or a few simple living
things. A hundred years ago Darwin and Wallace in their theory of natural selection,
or the survival of the fittest, explained how evolution could have happened, in terms
of processes known to take place today. In this book, John Maynard Smith describes how
their theory has been confirmed, but at the same time transformed, by recent research,
and in particular by the discovery of the laws of inheritance."

"Previous editions of
Evolutionary Biology were
praised for their broad scope, synthetic overview, and even-handed treatment of
controversial topics. The Third Edition, while maintaining these features, reflects the
ever greater breadth and depth of evolutionary science by providing expanded treatment
of many topics and by emphasizing the new intellectual and molecular perspectives that
have revolutionized evolutionary studies in the last decade. Reflecting its theme
that evolution both draws on and illuminates all the biological sciences, Evolutionary
Biology is the most comprehensive textbook in its field."

Darwin's Untimely Burial: by Stephen Jay Gould"Natural selection is the central concept of Darwinian theorythe
fittest survive and spread their favored traits through populations. Natural selection
is defined by Spencer's phrase 'survival of the fittest,' but what does this famous
bit of jargon really mean? Who are the fittest? And how is 'fitness' defined?"

Hooking Leviathan by Its Past: by Stephen Jay Gould"The embarrassment of past absence [of
cetacean transitionals] has been replace by a bounty of new evidence  and by the
sweetest series of transitional fossils an evolutionist could ever hope to find. Truly we have
met the enemy and he is now ours. Moreover, to add blessed insult to the creationists' injury,
these discoveries have arrived in a gradual and sequential fashion  a little bit at a
time, step by step, from a tentative hint fifteen years ago to a remarkable smoking gun early
in 1994." (also in PDF Format)

Evolution Makes Sense of Homologies: University of British Columbia"Why would certain cave-dwelling fish have degenerate eyes that cannot see?
Darwin made sense of homologous structures by supplying an evolutionary explanation for them:
'A structure is similar among related organisms because those organisms have all descended
from a common ancestor that had an equivalent trait.' Ridley uses a specific definition of
homology: 'A similarity between species that is not functionally necessary.' I interpret
this as: 'A similarity between species that exists despite several plausible alternative
traits that would function equally well.'"

Out of Africa vs. Multiregionalism: by Tod Billings"All anthropologist with few exceptions believe that the hominid line evolved
only in Africa, and then spread out throughout the rest of the world. The focus of this
debate however isn't where 'humans' in the interchangeable sense of simply 'hominids'
evolved rather where did our specific subspecies evolve?"